Goodbye New Scientist

Front Cover of New Scientist 21 April 2018.

After looking at the above picture, you will not be surprised to hear that I have cancelled my subscription to New Scientist (after too many decades to recall). There is nothing in the NS article that you haven’t heard before, repeatedly. Placing such material in New Scientist is a coup for the feminists, conveying as it does an aura of scientific respectability on their Patriarchy narrative – though they must be getting blasé now that they have total control of the media and can mob, vilify and destroy anyone who stands against them.

In truth, the origins of sexism lie in the female monopoly of the uterus, and the evolved pair bond which involves the ceding of moral authority to the woman as a surrogate for the offspring. As gatekeepers of sex, and hence the wielders of selection pressure, women have moulded men to their requirements. The result is resource provision flowing from men to women, for which men are now vilified in the form of the pay gap. The pay gap mantra and #MeToo are to be interpreted as women changing their required male spec. They have previously bred the Doberman, now they want a King Charles Spaniel. And all the while they are herding men in the direction of their choice, they hold the banner of Patriarchy in front of them to blindside men into believing that men are in charge: Patriarchy that great bugaboo, that Wizard of Oz, that charade, that act of mutual conning, that saviour of men’s blushes. The whole of this site is testament to sexist disadvantage of men, and how well it is hidden under the Patriarchy fig leaf.

It is several years since unacceptable gender-political articles started appearing in New Scientist. I did blog on a few, for instance Male and Female Brains, Letter to New Scientist (relating to on-line ‘hate’), Tim Hunt, Ellen Pao and the Reddit Debacle, and Ads in New Scientist – oh, and That Google Memo. In truth, there has been an objectionable article in virtually every edition for years now.

The previous edition (7 April 2018) included a dreadful Leader Editorial on the PSA test. The article lambasted famous men (e.g., Stephen Fry), who, after recently being diagnosed with prostate cancer, had been publicly urging men to get a PSA test. Like others who decry the PSA test, they had nothing to offer in its place. The effectiveness of the mammogram test for breast cancer has also been questioned in some quarters, but I doubt that you will ever see New Scientist advising women not to bother with one – they wouldn’t dare. But they are content to leave men with no test at all for a disease which is notoriously asymptomatic – until it is too late.

The fact that I attended the funeral of a college friend who died of prostate cancer a couple of weeks ago sharpens my opinion, as does the fact that the number of my friends who have, or have had, prostate cancer is getting too large to count. 

This terrible article even trotted out the flagrantly callous “men usually die with prostate cancer rather than of it“. You might have expected better of a scientific publication. Indeed you would, but then New Scientist is no longer a scientific publication. The fact that, if a man lives long enough he can expect to contract prostate cancer, but to die of something else, has no bearing whatsoever on the fact that in 2015 in the UK some 11,819 men died of prostate cancer – more than the number of women who died from breast cancer. That’s of not with, please note, New Scientist.

But I digress. Back to edition 21 April 2018, and that Origins of Sexism report. It was simply the stuff that you can read on a billionty web sites and a great many newspapers and magazines every day of the week. Here is another picture from the article, so you get the message…

I hardly need describe the contents of the article, do I? It is thick with ‘sexual violence’. Surprise!

It praises #MeToo as a positive movement for change. I had a rather different take on it in The Anatomy Of Our Decline and The Silence Of The Dogs.

To ‘prove’ male privilege the article reproduces the opinion of one trans woman. This has no place in any organ pretending to be scientific. Had they gathered personal experiences from a statistically meaningful sample of both trans women and trans men, and properly controlled for other effects such as race, family background, socioeconomics, etc., then it would have been an interesting piece of social research. As it is, all I can say is that I could quote trans women with the opposite opinion to that presented in the article. So what?

Here we have yet another article claiming to have identified the reason for the high male suicide rate. Guess what? “Seeking help could be construed as a threat to masculinity“. Ah! I felt sure it would be the fault of masculinity, i.e., men’s own fault. Well, everything is always men’s own fault. When men get killed in war, it’s their own fault – because men start all the wars. QED. Funny, though, as far as I’m aware, no one has done the research to identify the causes of male suicide. And as for it being “a loss of power, control and autonomy” (i.e., their own fault), those words would be perfectly apposite to describe the typical man’s experience of the Family Courts. There is ample evidence that men’s suicide peaks rather spectacularly after separation, especially if child contact issues are involved. And as for these macho fools’ failure in the help-seeking department, just where do the delightful authors of this piece of secondary feminism suggest that men can go to get help with defeating the monsters which feminism has prepared for them in the form of the Family Courts, the judicial system and the domestic violence industry?

Unconscious bias features as a heading – read my take on that here.

James Damore’s famous Google Memo is quoted. Oddly they don’t see fit to mention that the feminist hegemony had him summarily sacked. Well, it would hardly play well against the Patriarchy narrative. Heaven forbid that our feminist overlords should be seen to be powerful, let alone tyrannical. That would wreck everything. (I recall hearing a feminist interviewed on Radio 4 use Damore’s memo as a refutation that the feminist-left were censorious – a truly impressive display of pretzel logic). The article states that Damore “cited the influence of prenatal testosterone on developing brains as one possible cause” – that is, a cause of gender differences leading to a greater propensity of males to go into the tech sector. “Unfortunately for Damore“, it continues, “the science is not so clear cut“. Err, yes it is – see the references at the end of this post. Or watch this video featuring  Helena Cronin and Simon Baron Cohen

Amusingly, the New Scientist attempt to support their claim that the science is not so clear cut starts with two observations which actually support Damore, including the quote from Larry Cahill, “there are biologically based sex differences at all levels of mammalian brain function“. The only support for their own claim that the science is not so clear cut” is to cite “a study of 1400 human brains which found that they can’t be simply classified into male and female“. They gave no reference, but it is clear from the “1400 brains” that they are referring to the work of Daphna Joel which I deconstructed here. Joel is an apologist for social constructivism, seeming to wilfully misinterpret her team’s own brain scan findings. This was another case of both the New Scientist and Daphna Joel falling over themselves to align their empirical findings with a feminist interpretation. But they just don’t. It’s as if they’ve been shown a picture of a rabbit but they insist it’s a dog, because it’s a dog they want.

New Scientist is collaborating with the anti-scientific, social-constructivist, feminist-leftist propagandists. What use is a science magazine which promotes anti-science? None.

30 thoughts on “Goodbye New Scientist

  1. Michael Stanwick

    I only saw this today after scrolling the article beside the link.

    I too cancelled my subscription to NS about that time and purely for the reasons outlined in this article.

    I have been thinking about the manner in which radical feminists express the concept of ‘patriarchy’ and how their particular version is without supporting evidence. In order to correct the asymmetry, perhaps the term “misandrarchy” could be used to describe the ‘curdled bitterness’ behind the casual, anti-male ideological expressions put forward by radical feminists, that they in turn attribute to their version of ‘patriarchy?

    Reply
  2. Bonedagger

    This was on the cards. Lysenkoism, they call it. The long, slow march through the institutions mandated back in the 19th century meant ALL institutions; (once reliable) science publications included. We are simply witnessing the latest outlet to fall in the incremental takeover of all information supply, as witnessed in every nation-state expropration by Socialists, in history. If the loss to insanity of a favourite magazine is galling, think what the state is forcibly teaching the children.

    Reply
  3. Labour_is_bunk

    Regrettably, this is getting commoner – many august publications now parrot the feminist narrative. On the Conservative Woman website recently I drew attention to the National Trust having an article by the militant feminist Laura Bates – ostensibly “celebrating” the centenary of female suffrage, but in reality just a further exercise in man-bashing. Further, the new edition of Widen Cricketers’ Almanack has an article on “Sexism in Cricket” by Tanya Aldred (last year Ms Aldred penned another article about how climate change supposedly affects cricket – the “science was settled” of course.

    They’re on the march all right. Its more crucial than ever that sites such as this survive, prosper and propagate their message.

    Reply
    1. William Collins Post author

      On the plus side I suppose it means there is an opening in the market for a non-corrupted popular science periodical. If I were younger I might be tempted. Web based is do-able without huge capital expenditure.

      Reply
  4. Mike Porter

    Coincidentally, this very item surfaced on Mike Buchanan’s j4mb site a few days ago as well.
    Not only was Wilson an assistant editor at the Grauniad, she was also
    Senior Features editor, Digital Network Editor (no, me neither) and Editor in Chief of that propanda rag’s Australian Operation.

    It turns out that a number of high fliers in the New Sycophantist
    set-up – all men btw – have openly said they are a aiming at a new, younger (ie, more impressionable) audience.

    This may be at least part of the reason for this regretable situation

    Reply
  5. Dean Esmay

    I don’t believe the “gynocentrism” theory as it’s just a topsy-turvy inversion of the “Patriarchy” theory by pseudohistorians associated with A Voice for Men (which I used to be editor of but now denounce).

    “Gynocentrism” and “Patriarchy” are both rooted in a boatload of assumptions not really scientific and at odds with the historical record at that. There’s no science and almost no honest history in either of these whacky narratives.

    Reply
    1. Tim Goldich

      Hi Dean, agreed, replacing “men have the power; women are the victims” with “women have the power; men are the victims” is no step forward. And concepts like “gynocentrism” and “patriarchy” lead only to further entrenchment and division and escalation of the sexes “at war” with each other.

      Reply
    2. Phil Nice

      To my mind, “patriarchy/male privilege” and “gynocentrism/female privilege” just look like biological gender roles at work, genes doing what fires them up and what they do best. The feminist idea of berating men and masculinity for “patriarchy” rests for its legitimacy on a social constructionist denial of biology, the premise that men have been culturally privileged and endowed with power in ways that a revolutionary political movement can overturn if we just reinvent society etc. “Gynocentrism” is an idea arising from biology, evolutionary psychology and sexual selection and therefore not inherently equivalent to the feminist notion of “patriarchy.”

      I think one of the biggest mistakes made in debates with feminists is (inadvertently) legitimizing a bullshit premise like “male privilege” by opposing it with a false equivalent one, “female privilege,” but one should also ask oneself whether the false equivalence is created by the debater/writer or the listener/reader. Indeed, one of the feminists’ most despicable debate ploys (and dumbest logical fallacies) is assuming equivalence where there is none, e.g. criticism of social contructionism implies (the opposite extreme) essentialism, or criticism of man bashing implies (the opposite extreme) woman bashing. Whether or not “gynocentrism” has any factual merit, the idea is not inaccessible in gender debate as long as it’s used wisely. When feminists ask us to accept their big gun, “patriarchy,” based on all manner of dodgy thinking and crappy evidence, it can be well to remind them that thinking and evidence of at least the same calibre can be used to construct a big equalizer, “gynocentrism,” the upshot being that it’s better to put the guns down, drop the doubtful premises and start from some mutually agreed facts.

      Reply
      1. Tim E

        I agree that patriarchy and gynocentrism are two sides of the same coin and rooted in human biology. In a hostile, resource-scarce environment characterised by competition between groups it makes sense for men to take the risks (hunting, fishing, mining, fighting, long distance trading, exploring) in order to secure resources, and to protect and provide for women and children. That was the essential blueprint for reproductive success, which is why this pattern is repeated over and over again in traditional societies (including supposedly matriarchal societies like the Minangkabau in Sumatra, Indonesia). It also explains sexual dimorphism in humans – the sexes are physically different because they perform different biological roles. In traditional, less technologically advanced societies focused on survival it made no sense to send women and children out to fight against men, to hunt game, or to perform tasks that men were better able to perform (anything requiring strength that is).

        A feminist looks at traditional societies and sees only male privilege yet ignores, or blames men for, the disadvantages men face – such as the risk of premature death or disability, the obligation to provide for their family and community, and the responsibility (stress) of being the head of the family or community. Viewed through the lens of gynocentrism, you could argue that the men are the ones being callously manipulated and exploited by the women, since it is the men taking the risks and sacrificing themselves to provide for the women and children. In truth, men and women each had a mixture (I would argue a balance) of privileges and obligations.

        Drawing attention to gynocentrism is no less valid than drawing attention to male privilege, just as drawing attention to male disadvantage is no less valid than drawing attention to female disadvantage. However, feminism focuses solely on male privilege and female disadvantage and seeks to deny, ignore or blame men for male disadvantage while denying, ignoring or spuriously justifying female privilege. That’s why I liken feminism to malignant gynocentrism – it is unrestrained gynocentrism that seeks to monopolise all privilege for the benefit of women and girls while leaving men and boys only disadvantage and obligation.

        ‘The Patriarchy’ should not be confused with patriarchy. The former term is a loopy conspiracy theory not supported by evidence whereas the latter is simply a power structure. Feminists assume that if you replace all the (inherently evil) men in power with (inherently virtuous) women then all the problems in the world will end. However, very little changes except that women (thanks to their biologically programmed and socially-reinforced gynocentrism) feel under no obligation to exercise their power to protect and provide for men and boys in the way that men feel obliged to protect and provide for women and girls. Men become second class citizens in every respect, yet they still struggle to see past their own biologically programmed and socially-reinforced gynocentrism.

        What has enabled feminism to flourish is technology, which is almost entirely the product of male ingenuity, enterprise and effort. Take away technology and feminism inevitably collapses. Watch any episode of Survivor and you’ll see this principle in action. If you ever worry that women might not need men then just watch an all female episode and you’ll forever be cured of such concerns. Women have always complained about their lot and imagined that they are superior to men but it is male technology that has freed them from their biological constraints such that women can now fight wars, safe behind their computer screens, or mine for ore in air-conditioned comfort. Fossil fuels and machines now substitute for the manpower and horsepower of men and animals. One of the most significant technological advances for women was the invention of the female contraceptive pill, which has made it possible for women to control their own fertility, allowing them the opportunity to have both careers and families.

        I appreciate your point about the seeming futility of patriarchy vs gynocentrism arguments, but if feminists insist on focusing exclusively on male privilege then I think it is perfectly legitimate and necessary to highlight gynocentrism, especially when the male privilege they are banging on about is increasingly a myth. The real flaw in your reasoning is that you assume that feminists care about facts and logic – they never have and never will, otherwise they would cease to be feminists.

        As a final point, I do find it bizarre that a number of people commenting on this blog seriously doubt the existence of gynocentrism. How else do you explain the empathy gap so vividly illustrated here? Anyone with any doubt should read “The Bottom of the Rabbit Hole”. Alternatively, just keep taking those blue pills, switch your brain off, go back to sleep and pretend it was just a bad dream.

        Reply
    3. Tim E

      How about providing some reasoning and/or evidence to support your assertion? Feel free to critique my whacky narrative below. I’m relatively new to this debate so it should be a trifle for someone with your experience. In case you’re wondering I have no association with A Voice for Men.

      Reply
    4. bongstar420

      All of biology presumes females are the bottle neck in reproductive selection…so much so that female traits are more influenced by female choice than male choice. Men are shaped by women, and women are shaped by women. That is gynocentrism

      Reply
  6. james murphy

    Heroic research as ever (for which much thanks!) Perhaps we should have expected no more of a rag proudly and predictably proclaiming (- almost belatedly, given the zeitgeist!) in Jan, this year, 2018:
    “New Scientist, the world’s leading science and technology weekly magazine, is pleased to announce the appointment of Emily Wilson as Editor. – Emily is currently an Assistant Editor at the Guardian newspaper.

    Enough said.

    Reply
    1. William Collins Post author

      She took over only the week before the issue in question – and immediately pink pussy hats & MeToo. She must be so proud. Regrettably, this isn’t sarcasm. She really will be proud, I expect.

      Reply
          1. A

            No problemo. You’re the boss.

            To those reading the comments, here is a link to the relevant announcement. Naturally, they’ve confused the words “female” and “feminist” with each other.
            https://www.newscientist.com/article/2159965-new-scientist-appoints-emily-wilson-as-first-female-editor/

            She appears to already be making her “choices” known:
            http://tinypic.com/r/1zovoz9/9
            Clearly, she hates “patriarchy” (men), hates parents seeking to protect children from creepy people like her – and thinks yogurt might be magic.

    2. CitymanMichael

      Obviously Wilson wanted to make her stamp & make it early and clear. She has done that.

      William will not be the only subscriber to the NS to take a very dim view of the New Direction.

      Reply
  7. Rod

    Feminism has no standards, everything it touches it, prostitutes cheapens and rudely exploits.
    Leaving shite where there were qualities, discipline, and advancements.
    And how they hold their heads high!

    Reply
  8. William Gruff

    This has no place in any organ pretending to be scientific.

    Why not, when science is becoming a(n in)discipline in which big, spoiled, petulant children pretend to be rational adults searching for objective truth? For them a science magazine is just another vehicle for gossip columns, articles on hunky men, orgasms, make-up and pages and pages of big big photographs of ‘glamorous’ women in glitter and attention seeking dresses.

    Men will sort it out though, eventually; either Western men will remember that they were born with testicles or Eastern men will force the women into those oh so flattering black sacks with eye slits and hack off their heads when four friends of the men who raped them confirm that they are adulteresses and sluts.

    Reply
    1. promale

      “Men will sort it out though, eventually; either Western men will remember that they were born with testicles or Eastern men will force the women into those oh so flattering black sacks with eye slits and hack off their heads when four friends of the men who raped them confirm that they are adulteresses and sluts.”

      This is why men are slaves to women, men like you are always ready to promote the feminist narrative, only as long as it is directed towards other groups men. Islamic countries treat men far far worse than they treat women, are you saying this is some sort of answer? Muslim men are some of the biggest white knights women worshipers out there, they do not keep their women in line.

      This strong guy posturing is part of the problem too.

      Men getting their balls back will not push back against feminism, men taking proactive collective action will. The MRM is too right wing and will never do this.

      Feminism is not leftism, feminism is natural female social dominance playing out in a high tech society. Men are naturally submissive to women, and do not like other men.

      Reply
      1. Greg Allan

        ” Islamic countries treat men far far worse than they treat women”

        I’m pleased to see others are starting to become aware of this.

        Reply
      2. William Gruff

        This is why men are slaves to women, men like you are always ready to promote the feminist narrative, only as long as it is directed towards other groups men.

        Apart from to observe that since you do not know me you cannot know what I am like and that those who do know me know that I have never ‘promote[d] the feminist narrative’, I cannot be bothered to respond to your incoherent drivel.

        Reply
      3. A

        Please be more exact with your language. Because, with all due respect, talking about keeping women “in line” makes you sound like an actual lunatic.

        Reply
        1. William Gruff

          I can’t see any comment in which anyone has written about ‘keeping women “in line”. Whom are you addressing, and describing as a lunatic?

          Reply
          1. A

            Ok, Mr Gruff, please instruct your web browser to find/highlight the word-string: “women in line”.

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